Look at Jennifer Aniston’s Home Where She Lives with Her Partner

No detail was too small. “These are hard to earthquake proof—they had to insert a lot of steel inside,” says designer Stephen Shadley of a towering Japanese stone pagoda tucked away in a private garden outside Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux’s Bel Air master bedroom. Shadley, who was brought on to reimagine the 1965 house originally designed by A. Quincy Jones and purchased by Aniston in 2011, is speaking with AD’s editor-in-chief Amy Astley about some of the more minute design decisions that went into the sweeping project, which also saw contributions from L.A. designers Kathleen and Tommy Clements and Jane Hallworth.

It was, however, a first time for Shadley working with the couple together, a learning experience working to “mesh” Aniston’s cozy, West Coast taste with that of Theroux, whose design sensibility the architect describes as decidedly more “reflective of his New York lifestyle.” (In fact, Shadley also completed a combination duplex unit—including a grandfathered, covered-over mezzanine, no less—for Theroux in a historic 19th-century building alongside Washington Square Park.) “It was interesting to watch the dynamic between the two of them during the process,” he says. “It’s like any couple: When you bring these two disparate backgrounds together and you’re forming this union—it’s a lot of give and take.”

As Shadley tells it, Aniston is a dream client. Recalling the Levitt house, he says, “It was one of those projects where, as I came out of it, I thought, This will never happen again.” But of course it did. And with this new, much larger home came its own host of exciting challenges. Looking through the images from AD’s March 2018 cover story, Shadley, an AD100 designer, and Astley cover some of the highlights in each space.